He Loved You Hard. That Was the Problem.

A review of Michael — and an honest reckoning with the kind of love that gets children out of Gary, Indiana, and leaves wounds that never fully close.

Let me set the stage for you.

It’s a Friday night. You settle in. The screen opens on Gary, Indiana — a city that isn’t so much a place as it is a feeling. Cold. Industrial. Unforgiving. The kind of place that doesn’t ask you what you want to be when you grow up, because it already knows the answer. And then you meet Joe Jackson.

This is where the movie, Michael — a sweeping, visually stunning tribute to the King of Pop — earns both my admiration and my complicated feelings. Because the film does something many biopics are too timid to attempt: it tries to hold two truths at once. It just doesn’t always succeed.

“Jafar Jackson doesn’t just play Michael. He becomes the uncertainty — the searching — the boy behind the sequined glove.”

Let me give credit where it’s absolutely due. Jafar Jackson is outstanding. Outstanding. The kind of performance that makes you forget you’re watching a recreation. He challenged the legacy of his uncle — not by mimicking greatness, but by inhabiting something more vulnerable than that: the human being underneath it. Some of the camera work is breathtaking. The Pepsi commercial scene, the Thriller sequences — these aren’t just recreations. They’re love letters, rendered in light and sound. I left the theater feeling like I’d witnessed a tribute, not an autopsy. That matters.

I gave Michael a B+. I mean that sincerely.

· · ·

But Let’s Talk About Joe.

Here is where I need you to sit with me for a moment — especially if you’re a Black woman who has watched a man you loved lead with his fists before his feelings. Especially if you’re a Black man who grew up wondering if your father’s toughness was armor or indifference. This one’s for you.

The film makes Joe Jackson the villain. And I’m not here to tell you he wasn’t flawed — deeply, consequentially flawed. But there is a version of this story that goes missing in the telling, and I think we owe it to ourselves to name it.

Joe Jackson worked a steel mill in Gary, Indiana. He came home and taught his children instruments. He saw something in those kids that Gary, Indiana, didn’t have a frame for — and he built one. Imperfectly. With too much force. With a discipline that crossed the line more than once. But he built it.

“He didn’t hate Michael. I really don’t believe that. I think he loved him in the only language he’d ever been taught — and that language had no soft syllables in it.”

Three legendary families. The Jackson 5, the Jacksons, and the solo careers that followed. Every single one of them in a hall of fame. From a steel mill. From a hood. In the 1950s. Whatever you think of Joe Jackson the father, that vision — that ferocious, unrelenting belief that his children were built for something greater — that deserves acknowledgment alongside the condemnation.

This is the nuance the film couldn’t quite hold. It made Joe a monster when it could have made him a tragedy. And there’s a crucial difference between those two things.

· · ·

And Then There’s Catherine.

I want to say this plainly: I went into this film hoping to learn more about Catherine Jackson. I came out still waiting.

She was there. Through all of it. When Joe was figuring out how to pay rent and borrow instruments. When the kids were learning to play. When the dream was still just a dream that a Black family in Indiana had no business having. Catherine was there — quiet, constant, indispensable — and the film treats her the way we too often treat Black women who hold everything together: as background.

Her story is not a footnote. It is the foundation. How did she meet Joe? What did she see in him? What was it like to be the emotional center of a household that was simultaneously a training ground and a storm? Where did she find her strength, her voice, her sense of self in all of that? I want that film. Somebody needs to make that film.

Because here is what I know: the women who hold Black families together while the world argues about the men — they deserve to be seen. Not as supporting characters. Not as the quiet ones in the frame. As the protagonists of their own story.

APerformance

A−Spectacle

BNuance

C+Catherine

B+Overall

Michael is a good movie. It’s a worthy tribute. It’ll make you feel something real. But the most honest films don’t just show us the icon — they show us the people who shaped him, in all their complicated, broken, striving humanity. This one gets partway there.

The love was always there. It just didn’t always know how to show itself. And maybe that’s the most Michael Jackson thing of all.

Michael is now in theaters. This editorial reflects one viewer’s personal response and does not represent the views of the publication’s editorial board.